Thursday, September 17, 2009

Motorcycle Tour Benelux (part II)

I'm going to try to keep this as simple as possible, since my Blogger is no longer working. I meant to put the rest of the photos and my comments in part I, but it's still so messed up, I can't even edit the post. Believe it or not, Twitter now seems much less complicated to figure out. Funny thing is, as soon as I figure out how a system works, they change it, give me an "upgrade" with the latest and greatest. Oh well.

Our bike.  Getting ready to leave Belgium for Germany and Luxembourg.
Our group leader, Allan.  Really nice guy.
Peter - one cute grandpa.  If of course you like the skull face.
Roos (or in English, Rose)
Us.  Tired, sweaty, dirty - like always.
There are windmills all over - not just in Holland.
This is what it's all about.  The Ardennes.  Forest occasionally interrupted by fields or villages.  Hairpin turns.  15% grades.  Most of the time I was just hanging on, enjoying the adventure.
It feels good!
:)

Motorcycle Tour Benelux

I'm back in school and winter is fast approaching so this may have been the last (long) trip on the motorcycle this season. We started out in the early morning last Friday and met our group leader, Allan, in Utrecht.

From there we rode down into Belgium to Boeles Place.  I've blogged about them before - it's my favorite biker place to go to.  Over the weekend we went to Luxembourg and Germany as well, before returning to Belgium and then finally the Netherlands.  I did my best to take photos - although it rained (and thus the camera was safe in my pocket) and some of the photos I was trying to take from a moving bike - which isn't as easy as it looks.

I wish I could add more details to the images - the scents of the Ardennes forest, the freshness of a field after a light rain, or the sounds in the little villages of Flemish, Dutch, French, German and English being spoken by natives and tourists alike.  I'm pretty sure everyone with a motorcycle was out riding - we saw scores of bikers in groups from all over.  A perfect long weekend, until the very end with the rain.

Jan & his wife Anne-Marie run Boeles Place - and the food is always awesome.  I discovered hand-made sausages with cheese inside them are my new favorite barbecue meat.  Your mouth just dances when you eat them.
This is Jan.  Behind him, like every good bar in this part of the world is a witch.  It's good luck, I think.  If I find a link to the story of exactly how this tradition started, I'll post it.



Bikers in Belgium. 
Games hard-core bikers play.  This is a new one for me with dice - and I totally lost - but enjoyed it.  I'm not sure what it's called.

Yeah, we're totally bad-ass with Uno.  But I did learn how to say the colors in Dutch. 

On our tour we stopped by a German motorcycle shop.  I thought this was cool for a couple of reasons - it's so neat and tidy, and the bike they are working on is for a disabled (paraplegic) rider.

This is his other bike.  Just thought that was neat.







We rode through tiny little villages and towns.

You have to watch that Saturday afternoon traffic in some places.  :)

We stopped for lunch in Germany - and as usual there was no sauerkraut (or wurst) to be found. So I had French food instead. Hey, it's all good to me.

As usual, I'm completely unable to manage my Blogger HTML. It's refusing to publish yet another post, or at least this time publish it correctly in tables and properly aligned/spaced. You have no idea how many blog drafts I have stuck in limbo. I suppose this is all for now. I'll try to post the rest of the photos later. :)

I just checked back and boy is my post screwed - the photos are overlapping or otherwise off the page somehow. You know what? Maybe I'll just continue blogging somewhere else. Anyone have a suggestions for a better place to blog than this one?

Part two has a couple of the photos I wanted to post here, and it looks a bit better than this one. I checked around and it seems there are several others having the same problem with their blogs at the moment. However, this is only an annoyance. The rest of life is working out well!